I guess it would depend on

Submitted by adrenaline on Sun, 2008-07-27 19:16

I guess it would depend on what you mean by security. Using your example with the three laptops. I don't understand how you think it would be eaiser to violate the linux or the Mac os.

Truth is Window os get spyware. That can't happen on LInux because you need a password to write to the drive. Sure there is more winidows boxes, so they get targeted blah blah, but they do get targeted so that is the theme of this argument. Regardless since there is more that makes it more insecure. right??

 To your defence I believe that Vista is more safe, but the downfall of that is you have to run all the new securety running and when you surf you are forced to answer a bunch of questions to check out the site. If you shut that off because it is annoying you might as well be running XP. Not necessary in Mac Or Linux. "Cancel or Allow" 

Maybe someday Linux and mac will be more popular and get some sort of violation, but for now I think it will be a lot harder to exploit a mac or a linux box right now than a Windows box as per admission from the previious posters. 

I will stick to my linux box the OS is cheap and for now I need no 3rd party apps to keep it running or secure from Spyware or viruses. 

 Till, as you guys have stated, that Linux gets more popular, and gets targeted, and therefore making it less secure; at that time I will re-evaluate the security. 

 

 

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Oh boy... let the war begin!

Submitted by mikeart03a on Tue, 2008-07-15 14:42

Well, now the fanboy sound off has started... In my experience, security levels vary amongst users. Your average run of the mill user will have issues, the above average won't have as much, and your power gurus/IT guys won't have very many, if any issues, at all. So before I can conclude that Windows is actually more 'secure' than the other 2 proven ones, I'd like to see survey samplings, margin of error ratings, etc.

Generally speaking, Windows itself isn't a bad OS security-wise if all the the basic precautions are taken (update, firewall, anti-virus, spyware killer). I've never had too many serious issues with most folks and their windows installations that I've helped out. Just the usual pain in the arse virus to remove, spyware or wrongly configured firewall. Nothing serious other than my stupid friend who was downloading a ton of junk off limewire without scanning it for virusses first, had to nuke his entire hard drive with Kill Disk (and that took nearly 2 days with a 500gb drive).

- mike_art03a
IT Technician
Gov't of Canada

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Needing attention

Submitted by GreenTurtle on Tue, 2008-07-15 15:35

 I am pretty sure that if OSX and Linux achieve the popularity any of the Microsoft OS have; they will have security issues of their own. It is easy to say something is secure when nobody pays attention to it (hackers that is). Untill then however; they are set I suppose. I'll still take My PC with Vista:)

The grass is always greener on the other side.

 

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To anybody actually saying Vista's more secure than Linux...

Submitted by HeartBurnKid on Mon, 2008-07-14 12:53

Three Words: Pwn 2 Own.

Feel free to claim that it's more secure than OSX though, although that's mostly because of the boneheaded web browser that comes with it.

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something tells me that

Submitted by MarioJP on Mon, 2008-07-14 12:02

something tells me that there might be a flame war waiting to happen lol.

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PEBKAC is the issue

Submitted by M1K3Z0R on Mon, 2008-07-14 10:12

In my experience the greatest security threat is PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair, aka the user). The average user simply does not know what they are doing and thus cause themelves trouble, if everyone took some time to read up a bit on some basic pc security (switch browsers, do your updates, use AV/Firewall, use a custom HOSTS file etc etc) then the internet would be a safer place.

Anything's Hot Swappable if you're fast enough...

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Two factors at hand

Submitted by Da Man on Mon, 2008-07-14 09:10

There are truly two areas to determine risk
A) How vulnerable is the operating systems itself? Most definitely,technically speaking, Vista is much better than it's predecessors PLUS much more secure than Apple Leopard, Linux, and other open source languages. So if you had 3 laptops in room on a isolated network chance are you could hack into the Apple or Linux variant much easier than the Vista one (assuming all patches are applied to all machines)
B) What is the distribution of the OS? Sheer numbers. So as we all know there's a lot more Windows out there than the others. Therefore if 1% of all operating systems are at risk, then that 1% is much, much higher for Windows Vista based platforms simply put than something like Apple Leopard. So it would be Windows most likely on 20 to 1 scale vs the Apple OS.
So we can take that all into account and as the article noted above, the bad guys out there simply use B to target for openings. However the if Vista changes that 1% to a smaller number the game could change over the years adding in the fact that some users are migrating to other Operating Systems.

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